Neurodiversity: Because Great Minds Don’t Think Alike

That’s fantastic. The midlands, a little bit closer to home,
we’re down in Bristol. A reasonably cloudy day today, unfortunately,
probably not the Australian weather that you’ve got. Fantastic. Oh
brilliant, lots of people coming from all over. So when yeah, thank
you so much for joining. Keep telling us where you’re coming from.
We’ve got Northern Ireland, Jose from over in Northern Ireland,
Oh brilliant, a real mix of people from different universities, different organisations, different
workplaces. Oh,
fantastic, we have Peter over from Canada. Brilliant. Well keep sharing, yeah let us know
where you are joining from and kind of watch
join today. And also to mention captions are
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problems, our team are here to help you. So again just reach out to
any of our team and we’ll be happy to assist. Okay. So whilst people are still joining, let’s get
going. So
welcome again to this Skill Session webinar on
neurodiversity. So, Skill Sessions. What is it? Well, it’s an
event series run through CareScribe and essentially we’re
creating a space for education and knowledge sharing amongst
those working with disabled and neurodiverse individuals. That’s the
premise. We run both in-person and online events. Our last event which
you saw some clips from at the start there was based in Manchester, and
we tend to focus on a very specific subject in our events and try
and focus on that subject. So our last one
in Manchester was on hearing awareness, and for anybody who’s joining,
who was at that will hopefully agree it was a great success. This time, it’s our first one online
and this time we’re going
to be focusing on neurodiversity with the brilliant title
Neurodiversity, because great minds, don’t think alike. So I said this
event is run by a CareScribe so who are CareScribe? Well, I’m part of
CareScribe. So my name’s Rich. I’m one of the Founders and Directors
of the company. CareScribe is an assistive technology company based
down in Bristol. Neurodiversity is integral to who we are. So
myself and the two other Founders, Chris and Tom, we’re all
neurodivergent and so are many of our team. And as a
company, we spend every day working to support disabled and
neurodivergent individuals to work and study more independently. So
that’s our, our M.O. And we do this by building software. So that’s
the way in which we can effect that change, and our software
tools, you may have heard of before we’ve got to two software tools,
one of which is called Caption.Ed.
Caption.Ed is a captioning and note-taking tool that helps people to better comprehend and
retain information
The information is thrown at us pretty much constantly in our busy day to day lives
So that could be meetings, it could be conversations with colleagues, it could be learning
material in educational settings.
Essentially, we’re all pretty familiar with the huge
amount of information that’s thrown at us and for most people that
can be challenging and when you layer on a disability or
neurodivergent profile, it becomes can become even more
challenging. So, our software basically is designed to help support
in those those environments and it’s a tremendous value to a wide
range of people across both education and the workplace and
especially those with different disabilities, or as I say
neurodivergent profiles all the way from those who are
d/Deaf or have hearing loss who may find it difficult to comprehend
what’s being said to those who are maybe dyslexic, have ADHD or
ASD who may have actually very similar difficulties, finding it hard
to both comprehend information, focus or retain information. So
that’s one of our pieces of software Caption.Ed.
And our other one is called TalkType which is a dictation tool, helping people to convert their
thoughts into text and get things down on paper.
Again something that people, a wide range of people,
even, find it very challenging for a wide range of reasons. I
know we got lots of our customers on the call today, so that’s a very
exciting and so yeah, thank you for joining us and of course, if you
want any more information about CareScribe, who we are, what we do
please feel free to pop a message in the chat or get in touch with
us, send us some feedback and we’ll jump on a call and we can
give you more information. Wow, well, the numbers keep on, keep on
climbing. So yeah, that’s fantastic. Keep sharing where
you’re where you’re coming from and a bit of information about
you, that would be fantastic.It’s great to see the chats already
very active, so that’s brilliant. Other bit of housekeeping, we’ve
also got a Q&A tool that’s built into Zoom, which you might be
familiar with if you’ve been on Zoom before, but as we go, if you’ve
got any specific questions you want answers to, please pop them in
the Q&A, our team is on hand, so and we’re going to be keeping an eye on
things in the chat that maybe we can drag over to the Q&A but
we’ll go through that. And we’ll try and answer as many questions as
we can. You can also upvote questions, so if you see another
attendee has put really good question forward and you think oh I want
an answer to that then please just just click and upvote that because
we can then try and get through as many as we can in a priority order.
Good news is this webinar is recorded and so will aim to get the
recording over to you by the end of the week as well. So if you if
you miss anything, don’t worry, you’re going to be sent the recording.
Okeydoke. Well, the people joining us has slowed. Wow, we’ve got
lots and lots of people on the line so that’s, they’re absolutely
fantastic. So on to the good stuff, so welcome to Devon. Devon joins us from the Self
Agency here in
Bristol. Devon is an EDI consultant, Co-founder and Director. And
we actually first met Devon when she came all the way over to us
in CareScribe to talk about this very topic at our People’s Hub,
which is an internal event we run for our team regularly. She was
so brilliant that Lucy invited her to come along and speak to you
all today. So Devon, would you like to introduce yourself?
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Rich, that was a glowing introduction. Thank you so much for
having me here today. It’s great to get to work
further with CareScribe and also all of our lovely participants
today so thanks guys for logging on. And do please share in the
chat any any thoughts or any questions in the Q&A, we’ve got
loads of knowledge and a real mix of individuals with different lived
experience and professional experience on the call today. So the most
that you can share that would, that would be great so that we can
learn from each other as much as just hearing Richard I talk
to you guys, we really want to hear from you as well, so thank you for
that. I’m going to go ahead and just share my screen now so bear with
me one moment.
Okay, so, yeah, we’re here to talk about neurodiversity today and we have the
the title here of Great Minds Don’t Think Alike, which I think is really
key when we start to talk about neurodiversity, for many reasons.
When we look at innovation and progression neurodiversity is really
at the forefront at the moment. So, that’s where we’ve gone with this
name. I’m also the neurodiversity Champion for Bristol City Council.
So we’re looking at upscaling a lot of Bristol companies around
neurodiversity and making them aware of how neurodiversity can
really help their productivity, help their bottom line but most importantly
how they can use the neurodiversity model to best serve and look
after neurodivergent individuals who unfortunately, in the past have
been overlooked. And so with things, like cultural adaptations, and
some of the fantastic tech that’s coming out with companies like
CareScribe at the moment, we’re seeing a much brighter future for
neurodivergent individuals. So, the first thing that I’d like to
touch on around neurodiversity is a bit of the language because
we’ve already used a couple of those words at the moment that sound a
bit similar but also can be a bit confusing. So I’m going to
just take a little bit of time here with this wonderful slide from
The WI, who are having a big movement in recognising ADHD and autism in women and
girls. And they’ve created this beautiful slide in order
to help us understand some of those differences, particularly in the
language. So we can see here that a neurodivergent person here in the
the top left-hand corner of this slide might be somebody with a
diagnosis, or importantly, somebody that self-identifies as having ADHD,
OCD, autism, dyslexia, and about 200 more kind of identifiers there.
We’ll touch a little bit more on what some of those other conditions
or identities can look like, but for the purposes of explaining the
language, we’re just going to take these four. We can see here in the
next slide along that we’ve got somebody that might be considered a neurotypical person.
Now, when we use the word neurotypical, I like to
stress that we’re normally talking about the expectations within an
environment rather than ever believing that any brain could be
neurotypical. If we could fully realise the neurodiversity model, we
would see that everybody has a different brain and we might not have
a need for language like neurodivergent or neurotypical but for the purposes of processing
and and progressing the movement of
neurodiversity, these terms are useful now in terms of us explaining. So a neurotypical
person might have the trait or behaviors that we might
typically expect as an institution, or an organisation from our
staff, our students, from anybody incoming, what we might typically
expect them to behave like how we might typically expect them to
process things, if people are getting on board with that and that’s
really working for them, then we might refer to that person as a
neurotypical person. If we had a group all together of people with
just ADHD, we wouldn’t refer to that group as neurodiverse because
we’d have lots of the same brain. And if we were talking about this
in relation to biodiversity, for example, we might be looking a
garden. And if we had a garden full of sunflowers, we’d know that there
wasn’t much biodiversity in that garden. We’ve just got sunflowers.
But when we start to look at a garden that has sunflowers, roses,
bluebells, daffodils, daisies, other plants, you can think of, we start
to look at a biodiverse garden. And that’s the same with our brains.
When we start to look at a group of people and respect and value the
differences between everybody’s brains, that’s when we can start to
see that any group of people is neurodiverse, so we see diversity
within a group of brains, but we might see divergence in just one
brain when that person is perhaps differing from the typical
expectations. When somebody’s coming into our community, our
organisation, our institution, and perhaps, they’re not behaving in
The ways that we might typically expect or they’re not processing the
environment in the way we might typically expect, that’s when we
might be looking at a neurodivergent individual. So I’m hoping that
that description makes sense and we’re going to stick now with a bit
of our garden metaphor, as we move on to talk about the
neurodiversity model as a whole. So as we can see here, there are even
more identities and diagnoses, then we can see on this slide here that
come under the umbrella of neurodivergent, but here are some of the common ones that we
might see. And one of the main things we can
notice here, that makes the neurodiversity model differ from the
traditional medical model is that instead of underneath there being a
list of symptoms or difficulties, deficits, disorders, we start to look
at these differences on an asset based, in an asset-based. Way, right?
So we’re starting to focus about what’s strong in people with some
differences and not what’s wrong with them. So if we just go back to
our garden for a for a second and we imagine that we did have, this
time, let’s imagine we’ve got a garden of roses and we’ve introduced
a sunflower into our garden. So first of all, we’re not going to
start telling the the sunflower, we’re going to say, oh, you know,
you’ve just grown a bit tall. So that might be, you know, a growth disrder
or, you know, you seem to have yellow petals rather than red petals
that we were expecting. So we might see that as a red color deficit,
right? We can appreciate the sunflower for what it is and that allows
us to go one step further that allows us to appreciate that maybe
the sunflower needs different light, different soil. Maybe it needs a
trellis in the corner in order to grow and thrive. So we can’t just
give our sunflowers the same care, the same nourishment, the same
sunlight as our roses because they’re not going to be able to fulfill
their potentials as beautiful sunflowers. We have to provide the
sunflower with what it needs in order to be able to grow. The next
step is that we have to value the difference of the sunflower. So we
can provide it with all of its wants and needs and get it all set up
with its own with its reasonable recommendations, reasonable
adjustments. And then the next day we might come back and we might
say, well look we’ve given you all of these different adjustments.
We’ve given you your trellis, but we can see that you’re still not
looking like a rose. Where are your rose petals? We’ve given you what
you need, why is that not happening now? But as we can appreciate,
until we start to value the sunflower for its different kind of beauty
or for its sunflower seeds, or sunflower oil, and the amazing
products that can come out of it if we value and nurture it for it’s
difference, then that sunflower really isn’t a productive and valued
member of our team. We’re accepting the sunflower into our garden but
perhaps not making it belong. We’re accepting the sunflowers, a
member of our team, but we’re perhaps not valuing it for its
differences. So we can have diversity within our teams. We can tick
some boxes and, and build them up this way. But until we start to
really value the differences of people, in our teams, those
differences are no use to us because we get people masking or not
being able to have the space in order to let their differences grow
and shine. And difference is what starts innovation. Difference is
what drives progression. Difference is what’s going to make your team
be well and stand out in a crowd of teams that maybe have been doing
things a particular way for so long. We start to introduce the value
of difference and that’s where we can see some growth. That’s where
we start to see the innovation and the progression of the team. So,
before I move on from this slide, hopefully, we’ve all had a bit of a
chance to have a look around, and read some of the positives
underneath some of these labels that are so, traditionally,
stigmatised and discriminated agains. I just wanted to point out a
couple here that might strike you as unusual to find when we’re
talking about neuro diversity. So, we’ve got one here at the bottom,
acquired neurodiversity. So this is really people that may have been
through a trauma in their lives. A physical trauma, that’s changed the
way their brain thinks, an emotional trauma that’s changed the way
they process the world. This could be a big childhood trauma that’s
going to affect this person, the whole way through their lives or
this could be a recent bereavement. But we can all appreciate that
when we’re going through some of these really tough life events that
actually we are processing the world in a different way and we can
see that that’s what it means to be neurodivergent, when our brain is
processing things in a different way. And even when we might feel in
the midst of life event, that’s made us unhappy or challenged the way
that we’re living or thinking about making some changes in our lives.
This is a mindset that’s still valuable. Someone in that state of being
might be much more empathetic towards maybe some of service users or other staff
members that have been through similar things, they might
be the first people that are most likely to understand and intuitively get to grips with some of
those bigger emotional
questions that were starting to see being talked, about more and more
in the workplace, or in our education settings. It’s also important
here to mention mental health as well even when that’s not event-related. Even if we’re
looking at general anxiety disorder or a
major depressive condition, we’re starting to see that these people
also provide a difference and there’s always value in difference. So
we don’t always have to be focused on some of these, these labels or
these conditions as negatives. We can still see that these people
bring a fresh perspective to to our teams, to our communities and to
give the value to that perspective. If we value their difference of
perspective, it can open our eyes to a whole new way that people are
experiencing the things that we do. So I just really wanted to
mention those because I think often we can think of some of the, you
know, dyslexia, ADHD and autism. We’ve got autism on here. It’s under
autism spectrum, condition, or ASC. You might hear it, termed in a few
different ways, but it’s important to mention that these things
anybody could become neurodivergent. Anyone could have a period of being neurodivergent
in their lives. Whether you choose to take that
on as an identifying label or not. It’s obviously a personal choice,
but we can all appreciate and relate to the experience, perhaps. I
want to just come back to the Autistic Community at the moment and I say, the Autistic
Community with a capital, A, because that’s exactly
what’s happened. Within the autism movement, is that they’ve decided
so strongly that this is not a deficit or a disorder that they are
now referring to themselves as an Autistic person as opposed to a
person with autism, I should say as well. I’m speaking generally
here, there are individual preferences within the community, so it’s
always best to know what somebody personally refers to be referred
to but lots of the community are now spelling autism with the capital
A, they’re referring to themselves as the autistic and they’re seeing
themselves as an Autistic Community that’s different, not disordered. And so we can really
start to see how people are enjoying the
difference of their own brains, and we’re starting to see how others
are starting to find the joy in that too. If we look at companies
like Apple, for instance, they’ve been facilitating working environment
for autistic people since the 80s and this is in terms of the physical
environment, this is in terms of working hours. And they’ve done this
because they recognize that autistic brains were really good at
coming up with innovative tech, right? I’m sure they’re just
CareScribe people are scribbling down these notes as we speak, but we
can also appreciate that we can bring that into the present day,
right? So it’s not just about ED&I, although that for me
what I would say is most important. It’s also because this is the
best way to progress our businesses. We’re seeing some of the MI5
teams now, specifically hiring people or women I should say with
dyslexia and ADHD because that’s a demographic that has been
scientifically proven to be really good at recognising patterns. Why
wouldn’t you want them in your code-breaking department? So I’m just
trying to break down here how we can start to look at the assets.
Start to look at what’s strong with these neurodivergent individuals,
and not necessarily what’s wrong with them. And I’m not dismissing
the fact that they face challenges, I myself have ADHD and dyslexia
and by the time I was 25, I’d had 13 jobs, and this was because I
wasn’t able to find a place where my difference was valued enough.
Where I didn’t have to focus on what I was bad at continually, I
think I had more reading and writing and literacy practice in school
than anybody without a dislike for your diagnosis. And in some ways
that’s been great, it’s helped me to engage with the world as it is
today. So much of what we do is reading and writing in today’s world
and I’m so glad I can partake in that. I’m so glad that somebody gave
me the tools and the learning to overcome some of my challenges in
those areas. However, it doesn’t mean then that people need to be
deemed as as less than, as less worthy than, as less valuable.
Because actually, as we’re starting to see more and more things like
Dyslexic Thinking Movement are starting to be real assets. So I just
wanted to touch on that. And talk about how the neurodiversity model
is really focusing on people’s strengths and their assets as opposed to a list of symptoms to
be treated and cured. So, here we have our
Spiky Profiles, just, excuse me one moment.
Sorry, it’s a bit dry in this room. I’m just going to talk for a
minute about Spiky Profiles. So here we can see along the bottom
axis, we’ve got cognitive abilities. So those are things like
analytical thinking, social and emotional intelligence, visual thinking
and we’ve got a few on sort of data or arithmetic analysis. So all
sorts of different things, all sorts of different skills that our
brain performs and what we would normally see see, on a typical
profile of someone’s cognitive abilities is that their abilities
would tend to trend in the same line between easy and difficult for
that individual. So we can see here, some of the green teal coloured
line that falls in the middle of that graph. That’s how we would
normally tend to see someone’s plotted cognitive abilities with
little disparity between the ability in each cognitive function. What
we tend to see with a neurodivergent individual is a spiky profile.
So that means that some cognitive abilities can be performed with
great ease. While some cognitive abilities are greatly difficult in
comparison. So it’s important here to mention as well that we’re
talking about the difference between easy and difficult as opposed to
the difference between can do and can’t do. So there’s a lot of
dyslexic people out there who are, you know, well, well, in above
capable of writing a fantastic essay. It say it might be though that
writing that essay is the one task of their year that’s going to
drain them of their energy. It might be that the anxiety around that
having considered all of the micro traumas that a dyslexic person
might have based at school, which by the way, a neurodivergent person
is likely to receive one thousand five hundred micro traumas at
primary school alone. So, that’s things like being called stupid, not
good enough, not applying yourself those kinds of things, attacks to
someone’s personal character, and they receive up to 200 times more
criticism through their school education. So, when I talk about the
trauma that someone with dyslexia might arrive, at the task of
writing an essay, you can understand how that lived experience
might might provide a struggle for them, and in that instance, so
that’s one of the other factors that can make these tasks so
difficult.
We might not see though that that same person with dyslexia has a
completely below average reading and writing skill. Someone with
dyslexia might have a perfectly average reading and writing skill,
but as we can see here on the spiky profiles, it might be that
actually, it just doesn’t fall in line with their other skills. Their
other skills might well above exceed the average for the
nation, but because we see that their reading and writing, there’s
this big disparity, that’s what would make this person a
dyslexic individual, where we see a spiky profile. So spiky profiles
are perhaps one of the things, or one of the only things, that all
neurodivergent people might have in common. So there’s lots of
difference within the neurodivergent world but having a spiky profile
might be one of the things there that that bands us together. We all
have tasks that we could perform with great ease and some with great
difficulty, with a great disparity of ability between the two. So I’m
wondering if anyone on our call might have any, any things where
they think that this might relate to them, which I would come back
to. I’m just pulling up the chat here if anybody wanted to drop in
the chat any thoughts they had around things that just tend to
drain them. It might not be something that you necessarily have to do
often, but when that job comes around in your calendar, your sort of
thinking, oh, can I put this off? Can I leave this until
the end of the week? This is just feeling like a mammoth
mountain. So Jennifer’s of putting up here definitely time
management, but meeting new people is easy. Exactly. So, we might see that. Sorry, I’ve just
managed to click through there. Looking at the
messages. There we go. We might actually see that someone is great in
meetings. They really want to go and meet new people, that verbal
introduction, those networking skills might be really strong but
yes, getting yourself out of the door the right time, being able to
break down analytically what needs to happen between waking up in the
morning and the time that that meeting is, that might be a difficult
process. That might be the thing that drains us, whereas the meeting
itself was, what, was exciting? And I can see here as well Claire
saying that a noisy and bright office with interruptions is exhausting. Absolutely. So we might
be looking at sensory processing
here. Maybe we’re talking about, and I’ll talk in my own experience as somebody with ADHD
loud, busy noisy, places tend to
exhaust me and very, very quickly. So having things like noise
canceling headphones or noise-reduction headphones, you know, I can’t
believe I went through so many years of my life having to go home
from gigs and parties early. Now I have these, it’s something that I
can stick with for a bit longer. So amazing, I’ll get proof reading.
This is something that I’ve been talking about a lot recently, as I’ve
had some applications to write and some proof reading to do and I
find it really hard to go through something I’ve written and not just
rewrite the whole thing, creating twice as much work for myself. And
so, sometimes having somebody else read that back to me or some speech
to some text-to-speech recognition software to read back what I’ve
written, so I’m negating some of these cognitive abilities. I happen
to I have quite strong verbal skills. So I’m using what is one of my
assets, strong verbal skills, to overcome a challenge that I have
being a neurodivergent person which is reading things to proofread
them, right? So we can use some of these assets in order to overcome
some of the challenges that they’re having. It’s a really great, great
examples coming through here. Thank you so much for sharing guys.
This is like super, super valuable. I’m going to go through a couple
more. Well, we move on. I would love to kind of chat with everyone
about their different spiking profiles, because this is very exciting. Yeah, someone else is
using the text-to-speech, to read it
back. Thanks, Susan. And can tolerate some environments if I
have a special interest in but not if I’m not interested in, yeah, absolutely.
I think those sensory things can really be about the feeling that they
great within us. And if it’s something that our brain is naturally
interested in and invested in, we can sometimes like really welcome,
all of that sensory input, right? However, when we look at an
environment that we don’t have a positive relationship with from the
beginning, or maybe a relationship of boredom. You have said that
like, sometimes we really bored at work, right. But for somebody with
a sensory processing, that’s a really strong and sensitive sensory
processing system, it might be absolutely intolerable to be sat for
hours, listening to something that we’re just not interested in, that
might create such emotional dissonance between us and
our environments that it’s almost impossible to stay there. Amazing,
I’m gonna move on to the next one. Although I’ve just seen Mark
Writing here, can’t provide concise answers tend to over-explain and
I think I could totally go into this with all of our chat that we’ve
got going on here because there are some just fantastic answer. So
thank you so much for sharing guys, I really appreciate that and
hopefully we can tap into those conversations a little bit more in
the Q&A at the end. Right, let me just move on here. So,
lots and lots of you will be if not all of you will be familiar
with this pyramid. This is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. So, we
tend to be working across the board at all times. There’s a bit of a myth
about us starting at the bottom, and then once we’ve got those
sorted, we can move on to the next rung of Maslow’s ladder, and that
would be quite nice. That would mean like that. We only had to deal
with one thing at once, but as you’re probably all aware, we have to
deal with loads of things at once, right? We have to think about what
we’re having for dinner at the same time as we have to be thinking
about you know, the next lot of bills coming in the same time,
we have to be thinking about how well we’re looking after our friends
and family. At the same time, we’re thinking about our own perception
of ourselves and our bigger goals and plans for the future. So we can
see these needs tend to come at us from all directions at all the
time. And for a neurodivergent person, this can provide. There’s,
like, an extra layer of complication in this often because what is
typically learned by now by neurodivergent people or
everybody, or taught, is that there’s specific ways to get your needs met, and for lots of
neurodivergent individuals, these typical ways of
getting your needs met just don’t work. So for instance, some people
with ADHD prefer to work at night time, this is when their brains
really switched on this is proven by science where we’ve measured
people’s brain waves at different times and some people’s brains are
just active in the night time. I’m but you can understand if you’ve
gone through society as it is today, but that might take you a long
time to learn and accept about yourself because everything is set up to run the daytime
right? School is set up to run in the daytime
University is set up to run in the daytime and the majority of jobs are
set up to run in the daytime. So not only might take somebody with
that difference a long time to learn that the reason they’re so
tired is because actually they are staying up all day and all night.
And they might try and amend that behavior in themselves or try and
change that way that they’re meeting that need. And it’s only when
they themselves and society can accept our hey, this person just
needs to do half their work, you know, when the rest of us have gone
home and it will get done and we can trust it. That’s just the
difference that this person has then we can see when some adaptations
in need that person can have their needs met. And the same goes for
things as simple as water and food as we have on here. Right, a
neurodivergent person, this is something I struggle with myself as
someone with ADHD, I will forget to eat until the sensory input of
hunger is so strong that I’ll eat anything basically, so that kind of
trigger in people’s head of maybe getting things prepared and ready
earlier on, in the day, isn’t a factor and we can look up at the clock and see that we’ve
missed lunch time completely, right? And now
we’re expected to stay at our desks and not take a break before 4 PM, or whatever that time
is. And we can also see how some
organisations might begin to exploit individuals. May be with hyper
focus. So we might see somebody with ADHD or Autism. Contrary to
popular belief of having sort of an attention deficit, as somebody
mentioned in the chat earlier, when
a topic or a piece of work, has sparked an interest somebody with
ADHD, or somebody with autism, or anybody with that hyper focus
tendency might be able to sit and do an awful lot of work in quite a
short period of time with no brakes. And that for some companies is
really exciting. But do we need to be watching that these people
aren’t then missing out on getting some of their physiological needs
met? I’m going to talk about the safety needs in the love and
belonging in one package. So we talked a lot at work at the moment
about psychological safety and creating a place that is psychologically safe enough for
people to disclose about their personal lives or their
emotional state or perhaps even their diagnoses and labels. So as, as
employers, we can often think quite strongly about how we’d like
people to disclose and tell us as much as they possibly can, so that
we can provide as much help as we possibly can. This actually goes
against the advice that most neurodivergent people will be getting from their support groups
from their psychiatrist from their GP’s. This is
all about not being discriminated against, and as you will come along
to this webinar today, I’m sure you are not the people with the
discrimination, but maybe you can recognise that there are companies
out there that would discriminate against somebody for being autistic
or having ADHD or dyslexia. They may think that that makes that
person not able to do the role that they’ve applied for so people are
reluctant to disclose before application. And then, as we’ve
talked about before, when people been through, such a wealth of
trauma and a lack of belonging, maybe in any situation or Community
they’ve been in before, they’re going to need a bit of time for that
psychological safety to build up. One of the best ways for us to
expedite that and increase the psychological safety is to be
vulnerable as the people in charge. So if there’s a power dynamic
going on in your relationship with your team or older community, that
you’re serving, if you are managing them, or if you’re teaching them,
or if you’re the person that’s there to provide the service then, we
can be really brave. We can be radically compassionate and go out
there and say, hey, do you know what? I really struggle to make sure
that I eat lunch every day. Sometimes it gets to 6 PM and I’m
starving, and that’s because I’m not looking after these needs. If we
can share our own experiences about how our own brains function in
a space that’s not always optimum, that’s not always positive,
that sometimes is something we’re struggling with, we start to offer out
the idea to a lot of other people that are hearing us demonstrate
that that this is a safe space to share, that I’m going through
similar things, that I’m a human, and you’re a human, and we’re going
to go through these things together. So the more open and honest, we
can be about our own experiences, the more open, and honest, other
people can feel about their own. And it also allows us to remain
humble, and in an empathetic and listening space, right? If we have
kind of put out there, what we might find more difficult on the
cognitive abilities graph on spikey profiles, if we talk about the
jobs that maybe we’re us out during our working week, then we’re
starting to look more human, right? We’re starting to look more whole
in our workplaces. And when beginning to dispel some of this myth that we can leave our
emotions at the door, that we can leave our
personal lives, our family lives, you know, and separate them
somehow, but wouldn’t that be lovely? If you could pull those bits
out and put them in a box, I’m sure we all would. But actually, you
can’t. We’re really just pretending and neurodivergent people, maybe the
most. This is when we talk about masking, and this is where we talk
about people, maybe never having felt that sense of belonging before
For me, I was diagnosed with dyslexia when I was seven which quickly turned into me being
a bit of a
a difficult a problem for the staff at my school. The day I got my
assessment, I was put in the bottom sets for all of the classes
science and maths included, which are my favourite school. And I was
told that I was educationally subnormal, were the words that were used
at the time and I am very lucky that my mum was a wonderful human and told me that
actually, it just meant that my brain thought
differently and that was a fantastic thing, and not a deficit or a
disorder. But actually, it wasn’t long before the other students, my
peers picked up on the way that the teachers were treating me, and
that led to bullying at school. It’s almost a direct correlation in
the weeks following my dyslexia diagnosis that I began to be bullied
because the teachers were maybe a bit put out because, oh, she’s got
dyslexia and that’s means that she’s like, she thinks she’s special,
or we need to do this extra work to make sure she’s catered for and
that bullying, then followed me through my school. So, when I went to University, I was really
hoping things might be a bit different, but
unfortunately, by that point, I think some of the social and
emotional difficulties of my ADHD that was undiagnosed at the time
they were starting to play up as they do for a lot of people around
puberty and menopause. These are two of the areas, we really see the
symptoms of ADHD ramping up. So I didn’t have a great time at Uni
that in fact, I left because I wasn’t getting on socially, although
academically I was doing great. Then I went through my 13 jobs. I
won’t list them all for you, and in each of those jobs I joined with
such energy and passion in fact, not just me, but also the employers
thought that I might be CEO of that company by the time that I left.
But unfortunately, within about three months, I was burnt out, I was
unwell, my mental help was suffering and because I have that little
tenacious voice in the back of my head, that I’m sure was born for my
mum, telling me, I had a superpower and not a learning difficulty, when I
was younger, I thought, I went to occupational health, I went and had
1 to 1’s with my managers. I let them see me cry when I dragged myself
and in the morning when I wasn’t feeling well, nobody fought harder
than me to try and find a way to stay in one of these positions but
inevitably, it wouldn’t work out and I’d move on to the next place. Once I got my ADHD
diagnosis, I thought that that would change when I
took that bit of paper, that diagnosis to my manager at that time
said, look, I found the answer, this is what I have. They were like great,
so what now? And I didn’t know either. I wasn’t sure how that was
managed either. And so back to Occupational Health, we went, and it
was in three months of me, getting that diagnosis I was constructively dismissed from that
position as well, and that’s when
I chose to start my company. So, that’s where I chose to make a space
where I could have my own love and belonging where I could build on
my own self esteem. And hopefully one day build into to the
self-actualisation, although I think I need to go to like an ashram
in India and sit on a mountain for a while with my eyes closed,
which, you know, maybe isn’t in my attention span at the moment, but
who knows, what’s in the future, hey? And I just knew other people
felt the same as me. I knew other people get to this point where they
were battling with their self esteem, where they were just desperate
for a community and a sense of belonging where they could find
purpose and fulfillment. So I started self agency in order to go put
my arms around those people whose self esteem was in shreds, from what
I could see no good reason at all. Everybody has assets to be valued.
Everybody has a place where they can belong and a value that they can
provide. So we’re going for, I’ll use the words again, the radical
compassion, that means that these people can maybe have their first
place of belonging, they felt ever. And then maybe they can feel in a
psychologically safe enough space to explore some of these things to,
to use that psychological safe space in order to thrive and feel
fulfilled in order for our sunflowers to think, oh hey, look.
somebody’s giving me the things that I need and they want my
sunflower seeds as well. That’s exciting, right? Valued member of
this garden.
So that’s why we started the company. And again, if anybody has any tips on the
self-actualisation front, I’m really open to hearing
those. Just hang on. Yeah, sorry, going backwards and forwards a little bit here. So we just
want to talk briefly now about
Job carving and job crafting. So, these are what you might have
heard of before in terms of reasonable adjustments. Now,
reasonable is a debated part of that phrase at the moment. What’s
reasonable? Somebody pointed out to me that this is reason-able, that
this is for people who are able minded or able-bodied and that it
might have some able and ableism within that. If the adaptation is
going to mean that somebody can attend work that they can
fulfil some potential that they can be recognised and make a
valuable contribution, then we might just be looking at any adjustment hey, because this is a
human being at the end of the day and working
hours and workflows and work processes remaining the way that they always have done is
just never as important as a human being, never as
valuable to your team as what a human being can bring. So we start to look at job carving.
Let’s talk about that first of all. So it’s top
down management driven. So that means that management have to
demonstrate and to actively be involved in adapting processes and
physical workplaces. So in the team, maybe there’s people that love
to do the data analysis and the spreadsheets and the, the attention
to detail tasks, who really don’t like to have to stand up and present in the weekly meeting. Is
there a way that that role can be
split differently, so that the person that loves standing up in front
of the weekly meeting, but doesn’t like the spreadsheet? Like, is
there a way that we can share the workload based on people’s
strengths rather than based on the flow of the work? Can we base it
on the flow of people’s brains? Can we give more of a task to
somebody that they’re finding easy and enjoyable where they’re going
to be more productive, rather than taking up half of their week with
one task that’s on the difficult end of their cognitive abilities,
that’s going to slow them down. Particularly when we see that, if we
do the spiky profile of our whole team, we have all of those
cognitive abilities within the group. So that’s what we look at when
we’re talking about job carving. We’re talking about
what someone’s role could physically entail and what the workflows
and processes around could be shaped like in order to best support
the people. I always like to say that the opposite to job carving is
like people carving, right? Which sounds horrendous. But also we
know that trying to change a person is either impossible or much more
difficult than it would ever be to change a process. Job crafting is
some of those, some of the things that people put in earlier, I
noticed like about the space that you need to be in. So it’s driven
by the individuals themselves. So it might be something like taking
yourself to a quiet space to do certain types of work that you need
to do, it might be noise-canceling headphones, it might be going to
get specialist tech in order to better perform your job. However, One
thing I would have to say, around our specialist test to tech is the
most neurodivergent most neuro-diverse friendly thing that you can
do as a site-wide license, everybody can benefit from the assistive
tech, and it doesn’t single out those who rely on it. Everyone’s going
to benefit, get a site-wide license. Make it something that people
can request without having to go through Occupational Health, without
having to have a conversation about what’s wrong with them, right?
Everyone can benefit from site-wide licenses. That would be my one bit of
advice there. And so, we start to look at Job crafting being the
things of individuals are allowed to do things that are within their
freedoms at work, to make their environment, the best possible one
for them. And we can kind of see that that comes from having the
permission and the allowance from perhaps the management and the
people at the top. So maybe it all comes top down, but you can start
to see that the difference between the adaptations we can make as
organisations and the ones we can make as individuals. Our spiky
profiles really help us to get to grips with this as well. If anybody wanted to do their Spikey
Profile, if you just Google
Spikey Profiles you’ll find lots of different kind of tests, just
find one that, you know, speaks to you and we can start to maybe think
about like, oh so that’s why when these tasks happen, you know I’m
finding myself really stressed on those days. Maybe I just need to be
in a quieter environment, or maybe that’s what I’m going to do on my
day where I work from home. So we can really start to tell us things
about ourselves neurodivergent or not. It can really start to show us
why our weeks go the way they go. So, thank you so much
for coming to the presentation. I think we’re going to move on to
some Q&A’s in a minute, but it’s been great and thank you for all
of your, I’m just reading through again, some of the chats here, you
guys have been fantastic. So, thank you so much, and I’m going to
head back to Richard, who I think’s going to do, do our Q&A for
us and so let me just stop sharing this.
Hi Richard you’re back again. I’m back in the room. Thank you so much, Devon, that was,
that was amazing. Yeah, thank you for both education on sharing all
your personal stories. Fantastic. And then thank you to
everyone in the chat for sharing the sort of bits of your
personal stories, it’s fantastic. And yeah I think as you
said, Devon, the more people are willing to share, the more it kind of
creates a safe space for others to do the same. And that was very evident in this in the in the
webinar chat.
So, thanks for doing that. If people have questions, can you pop them, if you can, pop them
in the in the Q&A section which you can
get at the bottom of your screen, and we can we can pull them up and
we can we can chat about them. I know there’s a couple there already
which I’ll get started on. And so Kat asked, what’s the best way to
support an employee who is neurodivergent
(dyslexia and ADHD)? So any suggestions you’d sort of throw in
there? Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, I think it’s important to
say that with all all employees, but particularly neurodivergent
employees, the best thing you can do is get really brave with having
what may be typically looked as the difficult conversations at work. So it’s being willing to put
in the time in order to provide that
psychological safe space where someone can start sharing with you.
There is also if this is already disclosed and they’re kind of of in
a place of exploration themselves, I’d say fundamentally the best
thing that you can do with somebody that’s maybe got ADHD at work
is providing that flexibility, showing them, you trust them and
saying things like I’m going to allow you to work from home and come
in on your own schedule. As long as that’s meeting certain parameters
or, you know, you’re always welcome to go and use this quiet space
within work, giving them that flexibility. But you have to give
that flexibility with the trust at the same time that this person
wants to do their role and that they’re going fulfil that. So giving them,
the flexibility to figure out and maybe explore what environments are
going to work best for them. But yeah, I’d look at the environment
first, but I’d be interested, Richard, you’ve got something like,
wonderful tech that goes on here. Like, how has that helped you maybe
or other people? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, my not too dissimilar
story to you, Devin, I’m Dyslexic and was diagnosed probably
very, very last minute in my kind of a sort of main school
education. So I was kind of doing well in some areas and failing in
others. And then I got human support initially and that basically
enabled me to get my GCSE’S get A Levels and eventually that human
support to that point got me all the way into into medical school and
it was actually in medical school that I started to also use Tech. And it was
that combination of tech and human support, which has helped me. For me, note-taking has
been a big thing. So I really struggle to stay
focused and retain information and and that’s one of the reasons we
started building Caption.Ed.
To support captioning and note-taking. But other areas, for instance, I really really struggled
with, which has massively hindered me in the past
is public speaking. I was unable to speak publicly for a very very long time.
I think that actually stemmed from being asked to read out loud from
books in school ,and I just couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t read at
the pace in which to be able to talk in class and I found it pretty
pretty awful and that gave me this very big complex. It was
human support that got me kind of through that and, you know, my life
would be very different if I couldn’t talk about 30. So I think it’s
that combination of human and and and tech support really, that’s
that, yeah, the two complement each other. And yeah, there’s lots and
lots of things out there, including In the products that CareScribe
build. Yeah, absolutely. I think that human support can
allow us to get to the space where we’re open to the tech support as
well, right? We can start to see it not as a disorder or a deficit of
ourselves. So it’s not something we’re just beating ourselves apart,
and saying, we need to work harder, we’re just being lazy. Get on it.
Actually, we start to think. Oh well, this is just a difference my
brain has, I’m amazing at some other things so let me get the
assistance in on this end. Yeah, absolutely. And we’re you know, we’re
very lucky in this country there is there is funding available for
lots of things as well. So and I know there’s been mentions of Access
to Work and of course, there’s the Disabled Students Allowance as
well, but there are there are methods in place to sort of help with the
burden of costs. Ellen, has asked how do you deal with the
the psychological needs after the work day? So sometimes it
can be draining and you use use all your energy at work and then you
finish work and get home and you feel burnt out just by what, say,
neurotypicals may find a normal working day? So
there is like a dual part of this isn’t there. These are obviously some tasks that you’re doing
within your day that are on the difficult end of
your kind of cognitive functioning. And, what you’re talking about
here is like physical recovery you’ve got to go through when you get home.
Now, I would say that you have a choice here. Is this work super meaningful to you and you
want to do
anyway, even though it’s draining you and making you tired? And if so,
have an agreement with your employers. Look, I work really hard on these
things but it wipes me out. I need the space when I need it in order
to go and relax and recover, so that you’re not getting into a burnout
phase so that you’ve got this kind of like, right for days on three
days off or whatever kind of model would work for you. So that you’ve
got that recovery time built-in, or you’re looking at the cognitive
tasks that you’re doing through your day and maybe thinking, you know
what, it’s just these two things that crop up maybe once a
day that are absolutely draining me and maybe then there’s a conversation
with the other people at work about changing how you do those tasks
or changing who does those tasks. If you’re finishing, and you’re
feeling like, you’re always burn out, you need to change something so
that you can be well, right? So that you can be the most productive
and fulfilled you can be. Because it’s not, you know, we run
out of energy at some point, like you’ve put here about feeling like
you’re burnt out. But some of the actual tools that I use, I use
a lot of TV Comfort programs that I find emotionally regulating
weighted blanket, having a nice environment. So those are some of the things that I might
use. But I would have a think about how your
working day looks. Do you need to add the factor in more recovery
time? Or do you need to factor in that somebody else needs to be
doing the tasks are really burning you out.
And I think probably we got one probably got time for just one more,
very quick question. Looking at the other end sort of things, it’s
it says one thing I’m always, this is from Nicola, one thing I’m
always Keen to advise my clients on is how to adapt that hiring
process is to attract those who are neurodivergent, do
you have any examples of this that you can share? Yeah. If you’ve got
a brief answer that would be fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. So we provide neurodiversity
training for companies, so always send them my way. I’m really
happy to talk about running any training programs for people, but
what I would say in terms of recruitment is word of mouth, is always
going to be your best friend. And so, rather than getting people
maybe to focus on their recruitment process, get them focused on
having a fantastic place for neurodivergent people to work. Get them focused on this being
such an attractive, place for neurodivergent
people that neurodivergent people start talking to neurodivergent
people, and that those recommendations go down the line. Otherwise,
unfortunately, what ends up happening is that you have some companies who have a
fantastic recruitment in L and D team, that maybe
onboard people and do their onboarding training and neurodivergent people are
living in loving it. And then things go, south very quickly when
they hit their kind of day-to-day working team. And that kind of
press, I mean, like, I don’t name drop any of the companies that I
work from in the past but as you can hear from my experience,
somebody with ADHD is unlikely to go and work for any of the
companies that I might have worked for. So the best thing you can do
in order for the clients to have the best attraction to
neurodivergent people is to be a great place for neurodivergent
people to work. Not just a great place to learn to be hired. It’s
always about asking and opening up as well. So rather than maybe on
the on the hiring process maybe rather than saying, can you
disclose, if you’ve got any disabilities or access needs or do which
of these, do you have, tick a box, maybe just saying what’s the best
way that we could get to know you in an interview. Right? And let them
tell you in that way in an asset-based way. Yeah, amazing. Thanks so
much Devon. Well, we’re right at the end of our sort of allotted
time, I think it’s time to wrap up. So I want to say a massive,
thank you to Devon for coming along and and and giving us that talk,
which was, yeah enlightening I think for many people. So, thank you
so much and thank you to the huge numbers of you who joined and for
interacting and participating, because that’s made this and that’s
what makes these things successful and you will get an email with
today’s recording tomorrow around midday. So I know some of you
asked, is it recorded, it is. You’re going to get hold of it. So if you
joined later or anything you can, that will be there for you. There
will be a feedback link. Please share your thoughts because we’re
running these regularly, and it helps us to and tailor what we’re
doing. And look for future topics as well. Next month’s
webinar is going to focus on dyslexia, and we’re going to be joined
by Natalie Brooks from dyslexia in adults. So we’ll give you a
message about that, if you’ve got the time and want to join,
please do. And so, yeah, look out for the invite from us or it will
be on LinkedIn from there from CareScribe. Other than that, yeah, a
massive thank you again. Thanks to everybody for joining for
being so involved. Thank you to Devon for a fantastic talk and,
yeah, that’s it really, that’s a wrap. And so, yeah, we’ll be in
touch. Thank you so much everyone.